The Heart Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital is a pretty amazing place. It's a place where hundreds of medical professionals work together for a single goal, to help children with heart problems. This care team comes together to create a unique plan to treat and care for each patient. Can you imagine being a patient(often times, a critically ill patient) with a really large care team? While you'd reap the benefits of their coordinated expertise- it would likely be a bit overwhelming. Now imagine that you aren't the patient, but your child is. How would you navigate this team and advocate for your child?

The Enliven team is currently working to launch a care team kiosk in the Heart Center at the St. Louis Children's Hospital this spring. The kiosk will allow patient's families to better familiarize themselves with the physicians, nurses and other specialists that make up their care team. By empowering the patient's families with this knowledge, we hope to increase their ability to effectively advocate for their child's care.

Project Goals

It is well known that implementing patient-centered care strategies has huge potential to impact patient outcomes. A key part that our team is focusing on is empowering patient advocacy. We want families to be able to understand and navigate their care team so that they can interface with them as efficiently and effectively as possible.

There are four major goals of the project:

Contains comprehensive information about all patient-facing teams and team members

Presents all information in simple terms and always explain everything relative to the patient's family(e.g. This team is responsible for taking care of your child in this way)

Is easy to update content over time to reflect changes in the teams

Well designed and great user experience in software and hardware, centrally located in a highly visible area

The Solution

We're going to install a 12.9" iPad Pro, secured in a beautiful wall-mount built by Heckler Design, at the entrance to the Heart Center for easy access. On this touch screen, families can browse through Physicians, Surgeons, Nurses, Therapists, and other staff, and put a name with a face, a face with a name and gain an understanding of the role and responsibility of each team.

Additionally, the content will be easily managed by Heart Center admins, where they can create and organize teams and team members from a separate, easy-to-use, content management application. As they make updates, the application on the iPad will automatically update to reflect those changes.

To build this, we built a custom .NET Core web application, hosted in Azure, for content management. This secure application exposes its data through a Web API, so the iPad application can pull that information down easily.

The iPad application is a simple wrapper around a web application which uses HTML5, Isotope and Knockout.js to power the front end interface. It automatically refreshes after five minutes of inactivity and pulls the latest data in. Using Guided Access on the iPad allows us to securely scope the user's session to the Care Team application.

The user experience was designed to emphasize photos of team members, and was built to accommodate a variety of photo sizes and qualities. There was one software library that was particularly helpful in making it easy to resize, compress and rotate photos in the content admin, which is ImageSharp. It was designed from the ground up to support cross-platform .NET Core development and is a joy to use.

The Takeaway

We couldn't be more pleased to leverage our product strategy & technical execution capabilities to make a positive impact on the lives of families in the Heart Center. Stay tuned for future updates as this project goes live and evolves over time.